2.1 Defining culture and Culture
2.2 Cultural awareness
2.3 Intercultural communication
2.4 A review of research
2.5 References

2.3 Intercultural communication and intercultural communicative competence in language teaching

Hymes (1972), when defining communicative competence, pointed out the lack of consideration for "appropriateness" or the socio-cultural significance of an utterance in a given context. Canale and Swain (1980) identified the elements of communicative competence as consisting of linguistic competence, discourse competence, strategic competence, and sociolinguistic competence. Van Ek (1986) added two more components to the above list: socio-cultural competence, or the ability to function in several cultures, and social competence, meaning familiarity with differences in social customs, confidence, empathy and motivation to communicate with others.

Intercultural communicative competence (ICC) is seen by many language teaching professionals as an extension of communicative competence. In Beneke's (2000) words "intercultural communication in the wider sense of the word involves the use of significantly different linguistic codes and contact between people holding significantly different sets of values and models of the world [. ] Intercultural competence is to a large extent the ability to cope with one's own cultural background in interaction with others" (pp. 108-109).

According to Byram's well-developed model (1997) intercultural communicative competence requires certain attitudes, knowledge and skills in addition to linguistic, sociolinguistic and discourse competence. The attitudes include curiosity and openness as well as readiness to see other cultures and the speaker's own without being judgmental. The required knowledge is "of social groups and their products and practices in one's own and in one's interlocutor's country, and of the general processes of societal and individual interaction" (p. 51). Finally, the skills include those of interpreting and relating, discovery and interaction in addition to critical cultural awareness/political education.

Byram and Fleming (1998) claim that someone who has intercultural competence "has knowledge of one, or, preferably, more cultures and social identities and has the capacity to discover and relate to new people from other contexts for which they have not been prepared directly" (p. 9). Fantini (2000) describes five constructs that should be developed for successful intercultural communication: awareness, attitudes, skills, knowledge and language proficiency. Furthermore, he also cites the following commonly used attributes to describe the intercultural speaker: respect, empathy, flexibility, patience, interest, curiosity, openness, motivation, a sense of humor, tolerance for ambiguity, and a willingness to suspend judgment (p. 28). Empathy, not to be confused with sympathy, is viewed as an attitude, i.e. the apprehension of another's emotional state or condition. It derives from the enhancement of the cognitive learning through the affective. It requires understanding, an activity rather than passive acceptance. It requires a change in viewpoint which has to be worked towards, engaged with. It is not a feeling; it is an ability to participate in a "form of life" (Byram, 1989, p.89).

In this guide intercultural (communicative) competence (ICC) in general terms will be defined as "the ability to communicate effectively in cross-cultural situations and to relate appropriately in a variety of cultural contexts" (Bennett & Bennett, 2004; also similarly to Byram (1997, 2003), Byram, Gribkova & Starkey (2002), Corbett (2003), Moran (2001) and Samovar and Porter (1993) among others). For intercultural communication courses aiming to develop intercultural communicative competence we shall use teaching culture through language and teaching language-and-culture interchangeably. These courses consciously and systematically incorporate elements of both "big C" and "little c" culture-general knowledge through culture-specific examples that are not only coming from the target culture(s). They emphasize skills development in the areas of observation, interpreting and relating, mediation and discovery, as well as attitude formation to increase respect, empathy and tolerance for ambiguity, to raise interest in, curiosity about, and openness towards people from other cultures, and to encourage a willingness to suspend judgment.

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